Hillary reaction to Bill-Monica affair in the Oval Office: `He couldn’t be that insane’

According to the book “For Love of Politics” authored by Sally Bedell Smith, when Hillary got wind of Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, her first reaction was that “he couldn’t be that insane.”

The statement itself, according to Smith, is a pointer to Hillary’s thought process, a process that was less motivated by emotion and more by ambition and of having a place in history by becoming America’s first female president.

According to the New York Post, Bedell told WOR Radio’s Steve Malzberg that “If [Hillary] heard that he had sort of gone out and had a fling on the road, she could have believed that in a heartbeat. Look, she was not about to divorce him for doing something that he had been doing for their whole married life, the only difference being the magnitude.”

“But it was the fact that it was in the Oval Office, that it lasted for . . . 18 months, which is an astonishing length of time,” she added.

Smith said that people “have amnesia about the Clinton years because of 9/11 and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Another reason Hillary stayed in the marriage was because she was already thinking about her own future in politics.

“It was far more to her advantage to stay with Bill Clinton because she was already thinking about her own political ambitions,” Smith said on the show.

“One of her top advisers told me that one of the reasons, if not the reason, that she fought the impeachment so hard and was such a chief strategist during that whole period is that she saw her own political aspirations go down the drain. She had been thinking about the presidency for a long time.”

Smith said she learned about Hillary’s strategy for dealing with her husband’s cheating from a friend of the senator:

“One of her friends said that whenever he misbehaved, her first reaction was not ‘You’ve been a bad boy,’ but, ‘How can we get out of this?’ ” (ANI)